Monday, February 15. 2016

The European project Streaming Egos is concerned with digital identities as seen from the context of the six participating countries. At the same moment that the project was launched, France had just adopted the Intelligence Act, voted as an emergency measure in the whirlwind after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. This law, officially enacted October 3rd, provides a legal basis for an automatic, “generalized and undifferentiated” surveillance of the population via the opaque implementation of robot snitchers – algorithmic black boxes whose job it is to detect suspicious activity of potential terrorists – which are to be installed directly at the source, on the Internet providers' servers. Even before releasing the algorithms in the wild, the future head of the government commission overseeing technical installations, admitted that control would be difficult to enforce. The law, considered very intrusive, includes numerous blind spots and is highly problematic in regards to respecting privacy.

More recently, Paris again suffered new terrorist attacks, followed by the prolonged application of a State of Emergency giving the State extraordinary powers. The progressive deployment of this legislative arsenal increasingly infringes upon freedoms under the premise that France is “at war”. The point of departure for this research is a desire to experiment and evaluate different strategies (obfuscation, (im)proper names, cryptography, fake documents, reverse engineering) allowing one to creatively go undercover and imagine new ways to discern, protect, clone or falsify digital identities.

“You were born to be real not to be perfect” – Camille Martin

Eric Schmidt, while CEO of Google in August 2010 gave a taste of what was to come in an interview in the Wall Street Journal where he predicted that young people would one day have the possibility to change their name upon becoming adults in order to wipe the slate clean of previous teenage hijinks and other embarrassing escapades visible on the social networks.

As Marco Deseriis has underlined, “ensuring that a legal name identifies one and only individual--is an essential precondition of modern politics. It is through the legal codification of proper names that a government gets to know its people and can target either specific individuals through the security apparatus or segments of the population through the leverage of political economy. This double operation—which is both selective and extensive, individuating and massifying—is predicated upon the assumption that there should be one name and only one name for every subject, and never the same name for two different subjects.”

“Shut that ego down” – Camille Martin

In this context, homonymy appears as a scourge. A strong argument, in the era of Web 2.0 and social networks, where sharing the same name can become an identity headache. “Homonyms on the Web, Hell is other people” is a common title for e-reputation sites, between those who look like you, disturb you or crush you. In the press, stories of namesakes proliferate with the rapidity of new Facebook accounts and usually end badly, social networks banishing, often without scruples, users they consider as identity thieves or squatters of name brands.

Ordinary people become invisible in search engines because of a famous homonym, have their accounts brutally terminated for sharing the same name with a football player, teenage pop star, the North Corean president or the executive director of Facebook. Others have their bank accounts blocked, their wedding banquet destroyed, or even have their lives upset by harassment for having the same name as terrorists.

“Who would you like to be? Nobody” – Camille Martin

Homonymy becomes problematic, undermining the surveillance model for targeting individuals. The hypothesis of the participating artists was to turn the problem on its head, allowing them to theorize homonymy as a form of camouflage, creating a space for the ambiguity necessary for freedom of thought and action in a world of generalized tracking.

Multiplying the same name leads to blurring the referent. As the number of people with the same name increases, the more the subject disappears in the crowd. A strategy of obfuscation is developed, consisting in the multiplication of one's doubles, reducing their value and fidelity, through the deliberate production of ambiguous, confusing or deceiving information. In order to test this hypothesis, the French group created l'Association des Homonymes Anonymes (AHA), whose “vocation is helping, encouraging and guiding, by all means both necessary and useful, all homonyms, known, in the making or disavowed.” To quote the slogan of the Janez Jansas, a project by 3 Slovenian artists who changed their names to the Prime Minister's, “The more of us they are, the faster we'll reach our goal!”

The AHA project recalls the one Stéphanie Solinas made between 2003 and 2009 with some 200 homonyms "Dominique Lamberts", a very common name in France. The photographer, who undertook a poetic exploration of identity, asked them to fill out a personality test. A panel of experts (a psychologist, a statistician, a police inspector...) extrapolated a written “identity” from the responses, which were then submitted to an illustrator, who made a drawing, which was given to a policeman in view of producing a composite sketch. Upon which, she began a search for a person resembling the composite who was to be photographed. The true face of each Dominique Lambert remains hidden behind a series of aliases produced through a protocol, the logic of which becomes absurd.

“I'm so excited about my life that I haven't had sleep. Now this is what it feels like living your life based on joy and purpose!” – Camille Martin

Instead of looking up homonyms in a telephone book, AHA was experimenting with a similar strategy, using personal data and network identities. Its case study is focused on the name "Camille Martin", a kind of "digital native" version of Dominique Lambert "digital native", a mix of the most popular first and last names in France. Camille was also the name that the Zadistes chose to present themselves with. The name appeared during the blockade in Nantes where the Camilles occupied a terrain that was to be used for the construction of a new airport in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. A collective name, unisex and militant, was brandished in front of the media present on the site of the Zones à défendre (ZAD), (zones to defend) which expresses both a desire for anonymity and a horizontality in decision-making processes.

“Camille Martin and Camille Martin are now friends” – Camille Martin

In order to create this collective body of Camilles, we began by making a meta-profile on Twitter, a bot that automatically appropriates all the tweets by all the Camille Martins in real time, and tweets (not retweets) the text as if it was being posted by one person. We created a Facebook semi-automatic account which only friends Camille's homonyms and likes their posts. We collected their photos on Instagram, composited their faces, collected Camille's answers from Ask.fm, and submitted these data profiles to different types of profiling tools and applications for personality analysis available online in order to generate an absurd digital composite. This fusion of digital traces left by all the Camille Martins creates a shapeless aggregate of individuals, a liquid homonym identity.

“There are millions of gorgeous girls. The hard part is finding the total package. Beautiful inside and out.” – Camille Martin

Little by little, Camille Martin culture surprised us in its homogeneity, and seemed to speak as much about them as about the social networks in which it flourished. In this huge echo chamber, were you don't know any more who says what, the hundreds of singular identities were but one, a hall of mirrors with multiple ramifications. The Camille Martins, these “Young Girls” were tossed about in a custom computer program that brought them into contact with their origins: who personify a way of life characterized by uniformity and blandness, become a sort of human shield, where being mainstream, “normcore” appears as a common front.

In a political landscape of total traceability, where our actions are compulsively scrutinized, collected and analysed to elaborate statistical models of “normal” behaviour, this “becoming homonym” is the onset of a new collectivism, a bringing together of a community for blurring identities, and creating a smoke screen for rendering metadata useless.

Curiously, homonyms were recently the focus of several marketing campaigns in France, such as "Fight for your name", by the PSG, the Parisian football team and the telephone company Orange, which invited its customers who have the same name as a famous footbal player to confront their famous homonyms in a penalty kick contest. In Strasbourg, a business school, EM, launched a publicity campaign for new recruits, "Be distinctive", with a series of videos representing the homonyms of well-known French figures and stars (Christine Largarde, Didier Deschamps, Sophie Marceau...). The message is clear: "You can't choose your name but you can choose who you become". With AHA, we all become Camille Martins.

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